Zekreet Film City was built to be filmed, not lived in. Out on the Ras Abrouq peninsula, about 80 kilometres west of Doha, a full-scale Bedouin-style village was raised on the gravel plain as the set for an Arabic television series — crenellated walls, arcaded courtyards, carved wooden doors, a wind tower — and then simply left standing when the crew moved on. A kilometre away, on the escarpment above it, sit a handful of small stone huts, one of them balanced on top of a free-standing limestone pillar. Photographed from below against a hard blue sky, that tower has become the signature image of western Qatar, and it is a prop as well. Nothing built here is old. The rock under it is: wind has been undercutting these soft limestone mesas for millions of years, eating them away at the base until they stand on stems.
The set is free, unfenced and open whenever you turn up, and it is not a ruin. A Qatari flag flies over the gatehouse, the courtyards are swept, and the illusion breaks only in small ways — satellite dishes bolted to a wall, plastic chairs parked in the shade, a doorway that opens onto nothing. All of it lies inside the Al Reem Biosphere Reserve, listed by UNESCO in 2007, where reintroduced Arabian oryx and sand gazelle browse the acacia scrub in shallow depressions that flush green for a few weeks after a wet winter. Seven kilometres south, four steel plates by Richard Serra stand in a kilometre-long line across the gypsum flats. The peninsula's only real fort is ten kilometres south at Zekreet village, and Qatar Museums keeps it closed for now. After dark, with Doha's glare far behind you, the sky over the set turns as black as any in the country.